I’m writing a series of posts about my Christian upbringing and the philosophical and personal road to my deconversion. Often it is easy for atheists, especially for those who never were serious religious believers, to not understand how religious thinking works from the inside. What counts as evidence for or against theological propositions when you [Read More...]

Libby Anne details some of the anxieties she and others felt growing up as true believers in the rapture: I was very afraid the rapture might occur and I might be left behind. One morning when I was ten or twelve I woke up and couldn’t find anyone in the house. Before I realized that [Read More...]

In a column last week, Melinda Henneberger criticized the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt the Catholic Church from requirements it provide for its employees health insurance which would cover birth control at organizations it runs which have secular functions. The column is an extraordinary exemplification of religious entitlement, identity politics, and anti-secular, anti-democratic demands for [Read More...]

One of the myriad indicators of Christianity’s falsehood is the distinctly religious neuroses it regularly creates around something as natural and as good as sex. In the video below Lisa and Ed Young, authors of Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy with Your Spouse, discuss how they asked the married couples in their church to have [Read More...]

A few weeks ago, Amanda at Friendly Atheist fisked a new book on marriage, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together by Grace and Mark Driscoll. In the book an arrogant preacher and his wife detail their first unhealthy decade of marriage, spent treating each other and sex terribly, before giving marriage advice based [Read More...]

Salvaging Religion In this post I am going to explore the dangers of religion. For some context, I have written often that I think that there are good things that go by the name religion that atheists should try to salvage from authoritarians, irrationalists and bigots. I am generally optimistic about the idea that we [Read More...]

Last weekend the Republican candidates met for the “Thanksgiving Family Forum” where, except for Ron Paul, they each tried to prove they were the holiest Christian and, therefore, the most deserving candidate for president of our theocracy democracy. The actual discussions with the candidates do not start until 36 minutes in. And, as Jerry Coyne [Read More...]

Is William Lane Craig a philosopher? Some atheists seem to want to dismiss him as strictly a theologian and in no way a philosopher but sometimes he clearly attempts to make strictly philosophical arguments. By strictly philosophical arguments I mean ones whose premises make no necessary appeal to any presumed religious authorities but theoretically could [Read More...]